Anne Applebaum haz a sad:
I don’t know about you, but my heart sank when I read about Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March, planned for the Mall next weekend. My heart sank further when I learned that liberal groups, lacking any better ideas, have decided to take this endeavor seriously. It’s bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a “Rally to Restore Sanity” is to make it into a television comedian’s joke. But it’s far worse that the “moderates” in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Yeah! How dare someone who has done nothing but have a tv show dare stage a rally at the DC mall! Wait, what? I’m just gonna go ahead and bust this out for poor Anne:
On the other hand, maybe she is just sad she shares an office with America’s Concern Troll?
Joseph Nobles
The Washington Post recognizes the true targets of Stewart’s parody: them.
Comrade Javamanphil
No Anne, you don’t know about me. Or my friends. Or family. Or any of the people I interact with everyday. In fact, you don’t know about anything happening outside of WapoLand where the streets are clean, the turkey legs smoked and the male staffers only harass the interns. Please go away and stop writing. Forever.
Bulworth
G-damn, that some good sh*t.
This is too. Also.
I just remember when Anne waxed sad when Beck had his thousands on the Mall on the anniversary of MLK’s speech.
Jon H
If PETA is busing people for the “million moderate march” then that’s the overton window in action, right there.
JPL
Poor Anne! I assume she doesn’t do the NYTimes crosswords or she would have had another sad since the puzzle was about a significant event occurring 10/30/10. lol
fasteddie9318
Yes, Anne, if only we could get back to the glorious days when principled leaders could come together in the center and agree on a plan to fuck poor people over just a tiny bit more, what a wonderful world that would be.
Bulworth
Love the “lacking any better ideas”, Anne. Sheesh. And that dig about how conservative Dems who opposed HCR were “villified”. Oh, dear.
But to compound all this by flogging the Bloomberg for Prez Village dream is just too much.
Bill E Pilgrim
They don’t like the satire, but what they really can’t stand is the sanity. It just drives them nuts.
Bulworth
Kaplan Daily Prep ran Applebaum AND the op-ed by Cohen today (which was just gawdawful). Hiatt was truly in rare form today.
Violet
Good Lord. Who is this woman? From her column:
Not quite sure what she means by “achieve” but extremist terrorists managed to bring down the World Trade Center and crash two other planes. That’s not exactly nothing. By most accounts Stalin was an extremist, and he accomplished a lot. It was wasn’t necessarily good, but there was a lot of it.
Of course extremists achieve things. They just tend to do it with a lot of upheaval and chaos.
Tragic? Seriously? Is she auditioning for the Greek chorus in this tragedy or something?
fasteddie9318
@Bulworth:
This one really turns them on, because he might win, but if not then at least he might throw the election to Snowbilly Snooki, which for the DC press would be almost as awesome.
Allan
I’m sure that WaPo interprets the vast number of incoming links they receive from the blogosphere just as Christine O’Donnell interpreted the laughs and hoots at her First Amendment debatin’ skills.
Omnes Omnibus
Applebaum’s quality of work calls into question the validity of the Marshall Scholarship selection process.
licensed to kill time
__
Tragically Hipsters, Unite!
MaximusNYC
Has this woman ever watched The Daily Show? “Blackly humorous” is the name of the game.
Cris
You know, for their time, the suffragettes were extremists. The early labor unions were stuffed full of extremists. Extremism in the face of genuine oppression is no vice.
Bulworth
This column is so chock full of blind and stupid it couldn’t have been the work of one individual.
I wonder where Anne’s been the past two years?
Scott
Now, y’all gotta understand — for Applebaum, Beck and Palin are mainstream Villagers, and those “Million Moderate Marchers” are dangerous extremists. Don’t you see? They want to keep Palin out of the White House! Have you ever heard anything so demented? Annie Applebaum hasn’t.
Violet
@Cris:
Exactly. Extremists can work for good or for evil.
Who the hell is this woman? She can’t really have written this. Smells like the products of a wingnut concern troll focus group.
Bulworth
“Moderate” Democrats, meanwhile, no longer exist: In their place, we have “conservative Democrats.” Nobody pays attention to them either — unless, suddenly, one of them threatens to vote against health-care reform. And then he is vilified. ”
(Snip)
“In American politics, if you don’t want to cooperate with your political opponents — if you prefer to scorn them, shun them or call them names — that means that you don’t, in fact, want to get anything done. Moderates often achieve less than they could. But extremists achieve nothing at all. ”
So, Anne apparently didn’t like the HCR bill, legislation that mandates the purchase of health insurance from private carriers, itself a Republican idea of some standing. I wonder what Anne thinks the appropriate “bi-partisan” compromise was there? I wonder what Anne thought of the teabaggers gathering to yell racial epithets at African American congressman the weekend the bill passed. Who does Anne think has been doing the name-calling? Good gawd.
cleek
we need moderates, but only the right kind, and not that many of them, and it’s wrong to make fun of extremists, except when she does it and sometimes moderation doesn’t work, except sometimes it does and this one time, in 1994… waaahhhhhhh!
fuck you, you mealy-mouthed, milquetoast elitist.
GambitRF
I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I know at least one Villager and/or Fox News personality will between now and Saturday claim that a Million Moderate March is unnecessary, because the teabaggers are already the moderates.
bobbo
But a rally for men who anally raped 13-year-old girls and fled prosecution – that Queen Anne could support!
Ash Can
Extremists have taken over one of the two major American political parties. Does this woman drink Manhattans for breakfast?
soonergrunt
@Omnes Omnibus:
Maybe we can arrange for a child molester to be freed at the rally. That will bring Ms. Applebaum around.
Bulworth
true dat.
eemom
another embarrassment for 1980s era Yale alums.
RosiesDad
The best part of the Applebaum op-ed were the comments–she got fairly unanimously bitch slapped by her readers. My vote for the best was this:
4 words would sum up my reaction to this, but since one is an expletive, I’ll go with two: Lighten up.
Would have only been better if he had told her to go fuck her self.
soonergrunt
@bobbo: great minds, and all that.
Bailey
My favorite part of the article is when she lauds Bloomberg for being so darn reasonable but then is horrified when he endorses that wild-eyed, pinko commie liberal Harry Reid.
Whatevs.
bobbo
@soonergrunt:
Actually your post is better.
TooManyJens
“inexplicably”
Anne Applebaum lost me when she demonstrated that she’d never heard of Sharron Angle.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Well I for one welcome our moderately funny overlords.
That, and thank god that PETA isn’t bussing in the animals. There might be violence. Curbstomping, even. Have you ever been curbstomped by an enraged baby seal, or an escaped factory raised chicken? The horror…
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@TooManyJens:
Fixited.
brendancalling
@Joseph Nobles:
THIS. This is why you’re seeing so many op-eds attacking the rally, in a way that beck was not attacked. They understand, after the Daily Show, the Crossfire appearance, the press corps dinner, that the rally is a tremendous joke. Not only that: it may well get better attendance than beck’s rally. With luck we’ll have the photos to compare against Glenn’s turnout.
That would be a huge blow to the official narrative.
TooManyJens
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I can’t really argue.
I cringe at the notion of PETA bussing in people to a rally for sanity. I wonder what idiotic (and probably misogynistic) stunt they have planned this time.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@TooManyJens:
PETA and “sanity” don’t go together that’s for sure. They are soooo not how Stewart describes the demographic of this rally.
That being said, I’ve seen PETA tables/tents at rallies on the Mall before and they’ve always been benign.
MikeJ
@JPL: Hah! I hadn’t done it yet. Here’s a spoiler pic for those of you who don’t do the Times xword.
Suffern Ace
Had I written the column, it would have been something like: it is a tragedy that we in 2010 are still left with Stewart and Crew as people who we believe the most, who will stand up and speak about our frustrations with the crazy crap that comes out of the mouths of serious people and extremists. Were he an actual public official, we might believe that he might fight for us. Because, too, Al Franken appears to fight for us. So we are left once again with comedians fighting for us, just like 2004. And too bad there aren’t more like him.
Bubblegum Tate
I don’t even understand what she’s upset about.
Jay
Wait, Anne Applebaum actually took five minutes off from defending child-rapist Roman Polanski to write about something else?
Interesting.
cleek
@Bubblegum Tate:
i don’t think she does, either.
grendelkhan
Liberal groups lack any better ideas?
Man, I knew that conservative events get a big media bump, but this is ridiculous.
Sentient Puddle
I disagree with her, but I’m pretty sure she’s not Hitler.
cs
Her book on the Russian gulags was actually really good. You’d think someone who immersed herself into researching such an atrocity and a very repressive government would be happy to see a rally dedicated towards ridiculing those in power and presenting a strong counterweight to a conservative, nationalist movement.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Violet: Do you get the feeling she also likes to say “Wars never solve anything?”
Omnes Omnibus
@cs: You would think that, but you would be wrong.
RobertB
@Allan – it’s like The Atlantic and McArdle. The WP doesn’t GAS about how much sense it makes. All they care about are the eyeballs for the ads. Could be honest, could be a troll, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re looking.
Mnemosyne
@cs:
Sadly, given her age (similar to mine) she probably saw it as something the Evil Commies did and of course the US could never be guilty of anything so terrible. She just can’t make the connection that repression is bad anywhere and not just when it happens under Communist rule.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: IIRC she is married to a conservative Polish politician which, I am sure, has some bearing on her views.
El Cruzado
Man, and I was SO planning to go until I read Applebaum’s Words of Wisdom.
I even had a great idea for a sign (“Why, Some of My Best Friends are Republicans”).
cs
My previous statement was kinda naive. After giving it five more minutes of thought, the clear conclusion is that it’s all professional jealousy. Not just Applebaum, but the whole caboodle of pundits who are solemnly wringing their hands over the rally.
Jealousy over the fact that they’ll never have even remotely the influence Stewart / Colbert have. Sure, their articles might be read by the people who go to all the right parties, but any pundit with even a tiny bit of ambition also wants their words seriously considered by the great unwashed masses. They especially would want their sacred opinions influencing the younger generations.
But it’s never going to happen. Their audience is small and shrinking by the day. They’d have trouble attracting a roomful to a book signing, much less actually hosting a rally.
I’m sure there’s also some jealousy that Stewart / Colbert have the freedom to say what they want when the columnists obviously feel constrained to hew towards a particular villager ideology with any serious deviation putting their cushy careers at risk.
danimal
CS – Professional jealosy is part, but not all the answer. These folks have the most high-value real estate in the opinion-mongering field the WaPo editorial page. They are the creme-de-la-creme of editorializing. It’s not just that they sense that Stewart is rival who has more influence, it’s that they have lost their sense of purpose and don’t really understand why they have lost influence. They know they are the butt of Stewart’s joke, but they find it offensive and inexplicable. They think they are the left and they aren’t; and Stewart exposes their cushy Beltway insularity in a way that insults them.
They think they understand liberals and moderates and often speak for them but they haven’t recognized that the version of liberalism they espouse is preserved in amber from the Clinton inauguration. They act as if their natural constituency has turned on them. Well, things have changed, and they haven’t. Strategies that worked for Clinton are counter-productive today. They’re useless to the left and they don’t realize it. Anyone that listens to Juan Williams, or Cokie Roberts or even James Carville and thinks they are getting a “left” perspective is over 50 years old, I guarantee it.
Phoenix
@Cris:
Agree. I’m not sure we need more “moderation.” I’d argue we need more active, strong, advocacy from the left along with major direct action efforts- alongside the more moderate measures.
If the other side was interested in compromise, then yeah, more moderation would be great. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect most conservatives to respond to evidence based arguments at this point. And we’re beyond the point where letter writing, reasoned debate and the occasional genteel walk-a-thon protest, is effective.
Kerry Reid
This is the same Anne Appelbaum who defended Roman Polanski — and then whined about how it was so mean for people to point out that she failed to disclose that her husband is a Polish diplomat who was fighting Polanski’s extradition.
So she’s just another useless WaPo kneepad surfer.
I played the YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert’s White Press Correspondents’ Dinner address for a class today — pretty sad that the same humorless self-important bootlicking clowns in the room that day still keep missing the clue bus.
Norman Rogers
Another Andrew Jackson?
American needs a new President (well, eventually, anyway) and he or she should be the salt of the Earth, someone who walks in, takes one look at the ridiculous social requirements of the White House, and says, “nah, let’s have us a cookout!”
Can you imagine a President who works on his own car in the driveway? Or a President who insists on having his children play football in the yard? Or, dare I say, someone who puts up a volleyball net? I mean, you can say what you will about the duration and continuation of our republican form of government, but if someone were to erect a volleyball net on the grounds of the White House, I really do think there would be a return to the state of nature. And all of that. Ew.
Unless and until someone decides to dismantle the office of the First Lady, et al, and consign to the dusty annals of days gone by such trite fare as the Washington Correspondent’s Dinner and all of those other hoary examples of self-congratulatory nonsense, we shall always have an elite that tells us how Things Should Be in Their Town.
What would we do with a President who insists on spending time away at his ranch? Or one who retires to Camp David regularly just to breathe fresh air?
Wait. I am guessing that would be a bad thing.
Never mind.
We need another Benjamin Harrison.
lewp
These moran villagers will never get over being bitch-slapped by Colbert at their very own prom, the correspondents dinner.